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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
There Can be no such thing as an innocent reading of the Tale of Peter Rabbit. As that most percipient analyst of the later manuscripts, Enid Blyton, puts it: “We must pose this work the question of the specificity of its object, its relation to its object. The only reading of Peter Rabbit which speaks to us through the congealed layers of the past-becoming-present is a symptomatic reading—a reading in which we listen attentively to Beatrix Potter's silences”.
(1) Blyton, Enid, Lire le Peter Rabbit (Paris, Maspero, 1968)Google Scholar.
(2) See Poulantzas, Nicos, Hegemony, , Surplus and Unproductive Labour in the Cabbage Patch: a reply to Miliband, New Left Review, LXIV (1970)Google Scholar.
(3) Lukács, G., Weltgeist, , Naturgeschichte und Symbolsbegriffe bei Frau Tiggy Winkle, in Beatrix-Potter Studien, VIII (1956)Google Scholar.
(4) Adorno's biting comment is here very much to the point: “The thought to which a positive hypostasis of anything outside the immanence of the dialectic is forbidden, overshoots the subject with which it no longer simulates as [being one”. Adorno, T., Spasms (Frankfurt 1972)Google Scholar. This passage could have been written specifically with Mrs. Tiggy Winkle in mind.
